Although the cinematographer Christopher Challis, who has died aged 93, was an essential member of the Archers production company of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, he joined them as director of photography at the time of their decline. However, he worked on more of the great British writing-directing team's films than any other cinematographer. These eccentric, extravagant, intelligent and witty fantasies went against the British realist tradition, allowing more scope for a creative cinematographer such as Challis. The sensuous use of Technicolor and flamboyant sets and designs made them closer to the MGM world of Vincente Minnelli and of Stanley Donen, who used Challis on six of his films.

Perhaps Challis's finest achievement was on Powell and Pressburger's The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) which, as he explained, had "no optical effects or tricks. It was all edited in the camera with the use of gauzes, back lighting, jump and flash cuts." All of the sound of Jacques Offenbach's opera was post-synchronised and the feature was shot like a silent film, which liberated the camera, enabling it to roam at will through the extraordinary sets (designed by Hein Heckroth).

The London-born Challis was still in his teens when he worked as a camera assistant for Gaumont British News and became an apprentice technician at the Technicolor laboratory in the 1930s. He was then taken on as a technician on early British Technicolor movies such as The Drum (1938) and The Four Feathers (1939), both directed by Zoltan Korda, and was second unit cameraman on The Thief of Bagdad (1940), on which Powell was one of a trio of directors. The cinematographer of all three films was Georges Périnal, from whom Challis learned a lot, as he also did later from Jack Cardiff when he was his lighting cameraman on A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and Black Narcissus (1947), and his camera operator on The Red Shoes (1948). Challis later shot the Cardiff-directed The Long Ships (1964), the Viking epic in Super Technirama 70.

During the second world war, Challis served as a cameraman with the RAF film unit. His first film for the Archers as director of photography was The End of the River (1947), directed by Derek Twist, which was shot in black and white on the Amazon and starred Sabu. A curiosity today, it was an artistic and commercial failure.

The Small Back Room (1949) was the first true Powell-Pressburger film on which Challis was principal cinematographer. Again shooting in monochrome, Challis was this time able to realise his potential. This tale of an alcoholic bomb-disposal expert (David Farrar) was full of low-key expressionist and surreal touches, chiaroscuro lighting, claustrophobic interiors and a dazzling beach climax. Powell had requested "Caligari lighting", typical of 1920s German cinema, for the celebrated sequence where Farrar imagines himself crushed by a giant whisky bottle.

It was back to glorious Technicolor again for Powell and Pressburger, with Challis in charge of the cinematography, on The Elusive Pimpernel and Gone to Earth (both 1950), which, according to Duncan Petrie in his book on British cinematographers, "demonstrated Challis's ability to imbue the landscape with an almost elemental quality which shapes the lives of the characters who inhabit it".

Oh… Rosalinda!! (1955), Powell and Pressburger's fey updating of Die Fledermaus, was shot in a studio with Challis and the art director Heckroth making extensive use of the wide horizontal frame, breaking it up with blocks of colour to compensate for the lack of deep focus of CinemaScope. The last features Challis shot for the duo were two of their most conventional efforts, The Battle of the River Plate and Ill Met by Moonlight (both 1956), the latter of which was dubbed by one critic as "Ill Lit by Moonlight".

Away from the Archers, Challis worked on a number of bright commercial British movies such as Genevieve and The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (both 1953), A Shot in the Dark (1964), Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), for which he was nominated for a Bafta award, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and two Agatha Christie movies, The Mirror Crack'd (1980) and Evil Under the Sun (1981).

Challis was used almost as much by Donen as by Powell and Pressburger during Donen's British period in the 1960s, the two best films being Arabesque (1966), full of shifts of focus and disorientating camera angles as part of the mystery tale, and Two for the Road (1967), lusciously capturing the south of France locations.

On Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), Challis clashed with the production designer Alexandre Trauner, claiming that Trauner built his intricate sets without regard to the practicalities of film-making. He also complained that Wilder showed little interest in the visual aspects of the film, being too preoccupied with the script and the performances. Yet the film contains some striking location photography in Scotland.

The last film that Challis shot before retiring was also the director Joseph Losey's last film, Steaming (1985). A few years later, Challis, who served as president of the British Society of Cinematographers and was a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, wrote his memoirs entitled Are They Really So Awful?: A Cameraman's Chronicle, which took a nostalgic look at his 50 years in the business. In honour of his career, Bafta held a tribute lunch for him in November 2011.

Challis, who was predeceased by his wife, Peggy, is survived by his daughter, the novelist Sarah Challis.

• Christopher George Joseph Challis, cinematographer, born 18 March 1919; died 31 May 2012